The Punishment She Deserves

  “Nonsense. You’re more than enough for what I have in mind. If we use that Cole Porter number . . . ‘Anything Goes.’ You know it, right?”

  “If Buddy Holly didn’t sing it, I’m clueless.”

  “Well, never mind that. You’re going to love it. And if you’re worried about Umaymah being one of us, we can let Kaz decide. I’ll come by for you tonight round half past, as usual, by the way.”

  This reminded Barbara, to her chagrin, that tonight was a dance class evening. She thanked her stars she had nothing with her suitable for class save her tap shoes, which were in her suitcase where she’d obediently stored them for carting up to Ludlow, where she’d avoided putting them on. She said, “Haven’t the right clothes with me, Dee.”

  Dorothea fluttered her fingers. “Not a problem. I have an extra leotard. And don’t tell me you can’t possibly fit into it because just look at you, Detective Sergeant Havers. You’ve slimmed down so much that you’re a mere . . . a mere whatever of what you used to be. Which do you prefer then, the red or the black?”

  “Red,” Barbara said with a sigh. “Matches my shoes.”

  Dorothea said she would see to it, then, and off she went on her stilettos. Barbara watched her go and wished for her to trip on something and break her kneecap on the way back to her realm.

  No such luck.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Thomas Lynley was leaving for the day when Barbara Havers turned up at the side of the Healey Elliott in the underground car park. She was carrying a manila folder with her, and her expression told him that her report on the doings in Ludlow had been rejected.

  He lowered the window. “Who was it?”

  She said, “Ardery. The only saving grace is that I won’t be able to go to a bloody tap-dancing lesson tonight because I’ll be here doing this.”

  “Saving grace indeed. Get in, Sergeant.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, according to Ardery.”

  “Neither am I, apparently. But at least we can both sit.” He switched off the Healey Elliott’s engine as Havers rounded the car, opened the door, and plopped into the passenger’s seat.

  He said, “What’s wrong with the report?”

  He’d known, of course, that she’d been assigned to write it. She’d been hard at work upon it since she’d arrived in London with the DCS. He himself had brought her a sandwich and a cup of tea at half past three. She’d not left her desk save to use the ladies’, not even slithering into the stairwell for a smoke.

  “There was something the IPCC missed, sir. I put it in the report. I gave the report to the guv. She ordered that missing bit taken out.”

  “What was it?”

  “A timeline issue, nineteen days, that they didn’t make a note of or didn’t notice in the first place.”

  “And your opinion?”

  “That they didn’t notice. I barely did myself. But what I reckoned is that there’s also an investigation that someone in Shropshire did between the time of an anonymous call to 999 and the night that this bloke Druitt was arrested and died at the station. But if I put any of that in the report—that there’s probably been an investigation of Druitt that the IPCC didn’t get hold of—then it means this bloke’s dad isn’t going to be happy. And neither is Hillier.”

  “I see.”

  “So I can do what she’s telling me to do: take the timeline issue out of my report. Or I can leave it in and send this along”—she lifted the folder containing the original report—“to the dead bloke’s dad or to his MP. But if I take the information out . . . well, you know what it means. How many ways is cover-up spelled?”

  “Christ.”

  “He’s not available just now. You are. What should I do?”

  Lynley hadn’t the first idea what to tell her. She could read the future as well as he. If she deleted what Isabelle had ordered her to delete, she not only engaged in police malfeasance, she also stood in contravention to what she herself believed in. If she kept the information within the report and bypassed her superior officer by sending it onward to the dead man’s father or his MP, she was finished at the Met and she might be finished in policing as well.

  He said, “I can’t possibly tell you what your decision should be. You know that.”

  “S’pose I do,” she said.

  “The only direction I can give you is to consider what the additional information might do for the dead man’s father.”

  “You mean it might tell him his kid was a bona fide paedophile.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But let me ask you this: How did you come by this information?”

  “That there must be a report somewhere? Because I asked Ruddock to get me the recording of the anonymous message if he could. He managed to get it and he sent it along. The date was on it and that date was seriously before anyone got round to ordering an arrest of the bloke.”

  “Had Isabelle asked you to listen to that recording?”

  Havers shook her head. “She told me . . . well, she more or less ordered me not to, sir, since we have the transcript. But then Ruddock rang me and said he’d sent it and I reckoned five minutes away from writing the report wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “In other words, you went against her orders?”

  Havers was silent. Someone passed behind the Healey Elliott and Lynley caught a glimpse of their fellow officer, Philip Hale, on his way to his car. He was with Winston Nkata, and they were deep in conversation, so they didn’t catch sight of Havers and him also in conversation, which was just as well.

  She finally said, “I expect that’s how it might look. Only—”

  “Barbara, this could well be a case when there is no only. There is merely what you were ordered to do.”

  She nodded, but she was studying him as if she wanted something more, which he could not and would not give her. She said, “She keeps telling me—she kept telling me—that this and that weren’t part of our brief.”

  “Was that the truth?”

  “Reckon,” she said.

  “There you have it,” was his conclusion.

  But when, drooping of posture, she left him, he didn’t head for Belsize Park, where he was expected at the home of Daidre Trahair. Instead, he sat in the car and thought. Ultimately, he rang Daidre, telling her something had come up and he would be late. Then he went for the lifts.

  When he walked into Isabelle’s office, he found her packing up to go home for the day, cleaning off her desktop by sweeping things into drawers and stowing a stack of files into a leather satchel. She looked up from what she was doing and said, “Ah. She’s spoken to you. Of course, she would do. Let me be clear and save you the trouble of whatever you came to talk me into or out of. I’ve told her that I want the new report on my desk when I walk in tomorrow morning, and if she has to spend the night at her computer writing it, then that’s exactly what she’s going to do. So if you’re here to interfere in some way, might I foreshorten our coming conversation by telling you that she has her orders, I have mine, and you have yours. That’s how the system is meant to work, Tommy.”

  “And what, precisely, are my orders just now, guv?”

  “To stay out of affairs that don’t concern you.” She finished with the folders and clipped the satchel closed. She was standing, so they were eye to eye as she was quite tall and, with heels of a mere two inches on her shoes, she matched him in height. “I realise that this isn’t exactly part of your modus operandi, but on the remote possibility that it might become just that, I can be clearer if you request it.”

  “What happens to Barbara Havers does concern me,” he told her. “We’ve worked together a good many years and I’d like to continue to do so. I don’t want to see her transferred to the north for reasons having to do with her failure to obey an order requesting an obfuscation of the truth.”

  “Hon
estly, Tommy,” Ardery said irritably. “Can we attempt to have a conversation in which you don’t sound like an Oxford don? It’s extremely off-putting, not to mention annoying. And anyway, I know why you use that tone and that manner of speech with me. But the real question is: what exactly is the social distance gaining you?”

  Lynley had had enough conversations with Isabelle Ardery—both professional and personal—to recognise a verbal derailment when he heard one. He said, “Barbara believes that if she includes in her report what she sees as an important piece of information that was either missed, ignored, or deleted by someone at the IPCC—”

  “Are you actually suggesting that someone at the complaints commission—with absolutely no reason to do so—would have deliberately left out a detail crucial to their own investigation? As I’ve tried to make clear to Sergeant Havers, Tommy, they were looking into the immediate circumstances surrounding the death of Mr. Druitt, full stop. They were not there to conduct an investigation into the reasons for his arrest, and because of this, it wasn’t our remit to do that either. Sergeant Havers has had an impossibly difficult time seeing things that way. At the moment, I’m putting that down to her being more used to taking an active part in a murder investigation and not an investigation having to do with a report made by the IPCC. I can, of course, adjust my thinking on this matter. Say the word. Is that what you would have me do?”

  He had to admire her adroitness in shifting the focus onto him. He said, “Isn’t it to everyone’s benefit to get to the truth?”

  “What truth exactly? Sergeant Havers and I went beyond our remit as it was. We spoke with the dead man’s landlady, we looked into information we found in his diary, we tracked down a woman who’d met with him some half a dozen times before he died, I myself spoke to a college boy who assisted him at a children’s club in town, and the sergeant questioned a pub owner as well as a vagrant who’d seen the sort of binge drinking that the PCSO was asked to handle by phone on that night. Barbara has read every report a dozen times, we’ve questioned the pathologist who performed the postmortem examination, and . . . Really, must I go on? Because it seems to me that what you’re arguing—”

  “Isabelle, I’m not arguing at all.”

  “—is that unless we can prove or disprove something that’s impossible to prove or disprove without witnesses or corroborating evidence—and I’m speaking of the paedophilia here—then the entire investigation is at fault. I don’t agree with that assessment. And do stop calling me Isabelle. Now, if you don’t mind, it’s been an extraordinarily long day and I’m going home.”

  He was quiet for a moment, considering whether the point had finally been reached when he would have to speak. He went to the office door and closed it.

  She said, “We’ve completed our discussion, Inspector.”

  He replied with, “She knows how hard you hit it in Ludlow. She spoke to me about it while you were there.”

  She didn’t speak. But he saw her fingers spread against her thigh, and the whiteness beneath her nails was an indication of how much pressure she was applying.

  “You’ve got to see where this is going to lead,” he told her, “and you can’t avoid seeing where it’s led already.”

  “First of all,” she said with a deadly kind of quiet, “you are seriously out of order, Inspector. There is nothing in the moderate amount of drink I take that need concern you or anyone else. Second, I don’t appreciate Sergeant Havers playing copper’s nark. In her present position, that not only doesn’t become her, it also endangers her.”

  “Which is why she expressed her concern only to me. May we sit for a moment, guv?” He indicated the two chairs in front of her desk.

  “We may not. I think I’ve made myself clear that there’s nothing more to talk about. If the sergeant wishes to draw a conclusion about me and pass it along to you and God knows who else—”

  “She won’t have done that.”

  “Which part? No, don’t answer. She’s already done the first part, hasn’t she. She’s spoken to you without bothering to give me the slightest indication of her uneasiness. Which, by the way, was quite simple for her to shrug off, apparently, as she was happy enough to take the opportunity of doing some drinking herself.”

  “For God’s sake, Isabelle, what else was she supposed to do? You have her boxed in in such a way that any move she makes might well be enough to send her packing north. She was afraid to refuse the drinks. You must know that.”

  “And what you must know is that Barbara Havers richly deserves to be exactly where she is just now.”

  “Fine. Admitted. She was completely out of order last year. But what I also know is that you’re quite adept at alteration in a conversation, moving from a subject you don’t wish to discuss to a subject guaranteed to put the other person on the defensive.”

  “If Barbara Havers finds herself in a position of defence—”

  “I’m bloody well not talking about Barbara Havers!”

  Having spoken, Lynley felt immediately exasperated with himself. He’d long ago eschewed raising his voice once he’d learned how little distance volume ever went in making some sort of point with an addict. His own brother had taught him that. He took a moment for calm and then said, “Isabelle.”

  “Do not—”

  “Isabelle. You stand to lose everything. You can’t want that. You’ve lost your marriage, you’ve lost your—”

  “Stop this instant.”

  “—sons, and if you keep on this path, you’re going to lose your job as well. You’re fighting battles on too many fronts and you’ve begun to unravel.” He wished she would sit. He wished they both would sit. He wanted to be in a chair facing hers so that he could grasp her hand in order to let her know that he actually did see what she was going through. Ludicrously, he felt that if she could feel the touch of his hand and know a moment of human connection, it might somehow move her. He said, “I don’t think you’re able to see this because you can’t afford to see it. If you see it, you’ll have to admit it. If you admit it, you’ll have to take action. And this will be real action, not action having to do with hiring solicitors to tilt at windmills for you.”

  For a moment, she said nothing at all, but a pulse rapidly hammered the vein in her temple. Then, “You are one of my largest regrets, Inspector. I must have been quite mad. You are, of course, very good in bed, as I’m sure many women have told you, but for you to take what was on my part a period of weakness and to use it to make these kinds of allegations against me . . . What will it be next? A threat to go to Hillier?”

  “You aren’t going to succeed in changing the subject, but I will acknowledge your attempt to do that by noting that, yes, we were lovers and you regret it. For my part, I say it wasn’t the best of ideas, but we were both vulnerable at the time.”

  “I wasn’t nor have I ever been vulnerable. And certainly not to you and your handsome ways.”

  “Accepted. Whatever you wish to make of it. But having been lovers isn’t the point. Your drinking is the point. You’re no longer doing it to escape whatever you were once wishing to escape when you first began. You’re doing it now because you must. You think you can control it but you must see, after Ludlow, that you can’t. You’re going to need help. You do need help.”

  “Not yours.”

  “I’m not volunteering. But I’m also not standing aside and letting your alcoholism hurt or destroy the people around you. Handle the drinking any way you will, but keep clear of damaging Barbara Havers. Because if you do, Isabelle, if you have her transferred out of some sense of pique, then I will do something and you’re not going to like what it is.”

  He turned to leave, but her next words stopped him.

  “How dare you threaten me.” He faced her once again and she went on, her voice icy. “Do you know what I could do with that last statement of yours if I chose to? Do you have any idea how mu
ch Hillier would love to be rid of you as well? Or do you, perhaps, believe that having a mouldy title attached to your name actually protects you in some way? Are you really thinking that Hillier isn’t looking for a move to make against you because . . . what? He envies you your fine London townhouse and your rotting-from-the-rafters estate? He’s ambitious for some other title besides his completely ridiculous knighthood and he believes that you—outranking him in the realm of the utterly meaningless—could put the crunch on his advancement to . . . What would it be? Baronet?”

  “Isabelle, you must—”

  “I must nothing. And certainly not upon your advice. You’d be very wise to believe me when I tell you that this sort of thing”—and here she gestured rudely round the office as if to indicate the conversation they’d been having—“is exactly what Hillier is waiting for: an unforgivable act of insubordination that clearly makes it impossible for you to remain employed by the Metropolitan Police. And a word from me . . . about what’s gone on here . . . right here in this office . . . a word from me . . .”

  Lynley could see how badly she was shaking. He knew she needed a drink. She looked so terrible that he very nearly told her to take the vodka from her desk please, an airline bottle, because he knew it was there and she ought to drink it down quickly now.

  He said with his eyes on hers, “Isabelle. Guv. I’m speaking to you about this as a colleague, a fellow officer, and a friend, I hope. You’re in pain. You’re afraid. And you’re not alone in that because nearly everyone round us is also afraid and probably in pain and also trying to do something about it. Including me, as you well know. But the choice you’re making in order to cope is going to destroy the very things you’re trying to protect. What I’m here to say is that I hope you know this and I hope you intend to do something about it.”

  There was nothing left for him to say to her. He waited to see if she would respond. When she didn’t, he nodded and then he left her, shutting the door quietly behind him. He paused just beyond it. Once again, he waited. Then he heard the sound of her desk drawer opening, recognising the squeak of it because it was the desk that he, too, had occupied during the period when he acted as superintendent while the higher-ups decided who would replace the retired Malcolm Webberly.